Estrogen excess: What you need to know and how to avoid it

By Dr. Natasha Turner for Blisstree.com

Estrogen balance is essential for achieving and maintaining fat loss. If you are a premenopausal with PMS, too much body fat around the hips, and difficulty losing weight, you likely have an excess of estrogen.

As a result, you may also have a history of gallstones, varicose veins, uterine fibroids, cervical dysplasia, endometriosis or ovarian cysts. In both sexes, estrogen dominance is thought to be responsible for many types of cancers. This particular hormone imbalance is currently estimated to be one of the leading causes of breast, uterine and prostate cancer.

How do we get it?

In men and premenopausal women, too much estrogen, a condition called estrogen dominance, causes toxic fat gain, water retention, bloating and a host of other health and wellness issues.

There are only two ways to accumulate excess estrogen in the body: we either produce too much of it on our own or acquire it from our environment or diet. Unfortunately, accumulating estrogen is not hard. We are constantly exposed to estrogen-like compounds in foods that contain toxic pesticides, herbicides and growth hormones. Many of these toxins are known to cause weight gain, which serves to fuel the production of more estrogen from our own fat cells. More weight gain then leads to insulin resistance which, you guessed it, increases the risk of estrogen dominance.

Pharmaceutical hormones such as those used in hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) or the birth control pill also increase estrogen, whether we take them actively or absorb them when they make their way into our drinking water. We are living in a virtual sea of harmful estrogens, and researchers are only beginning to identify the extent of this exposure on health in humans and even other species.

Keep reading for specific foods and habits that can help you get rid of excess estrogen…

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